'I thought it would last forever... but I went into a dark period': Bouquet Of Barbed Wire star Susan Penhaligon reveals her controversial route to fame

In the innocent days of 1976, a drama driven by incest and adultery transfixed 26m viewers and catapulted Susan Penhaligon to overnight fame. Now, as the show is remade, she reveals the long shadow it cast on her career – and chaotic personal life

It was arguably the most controversial television drama of its generation, shattering sexual boundaries and challenging Middle England’s moral code. Bouquet Of Barbed Wire, with its electric undercurrents of incest and adultery, shocked and enthralled in equal measure.

Based on the novel by Andrea Newman, it starred Frank Finlay as Peter Manson, an obsessive father fighting his infatuation for his daughter Prue, whose wife Cassie takes revenge by having an affair with her son-in-law Gavin.

Tangled lives: The actress Susan Penhaligon as she is today

A record 26million viewers watched the seven scandalous episodes in 1976, the eroticism all the more charged because much of the sexual tension was implied with lingering looks.

But Now ITV is to remake Bouquet – this time with Trevor Eve and Hermione Norris as the warring parents – to be screened next year.

Ingenue Prue is yet to be cast. In the Seventies original, she was a shameless manipulator, with a flagrant disregard for decent values and social niceties who continued her flirtation with her father despite being pregnant.

What made her character even more shocking was the way actress Susan Penhaligon played her.

With her alluring green eyes and petulant pout, she was a compelling combination of innocence and corruption. The role was to have a lifelong impact on the aspiring star, who by her own admission didn’t grow up until she was 40.

‘Prue was a complete bitch,’ says Susan today. ‘She was controversial because she used her father for her own needs. She knew he fancied her and wanted to control him and get her own way.

‘Compared to today’s standards, it was a teddy bears’ picnic. But I think the incest will still make it controversial in a remake.’

Susan with Frank Finlay in the Bouquet of Barbed Wire series

On set, Susan understood exactly how her character worked. Off it, she was somewhat less self-assured. She had gone from a jobbing actress – albeit one not unacquainted with controversy – to one of the most famous women in Britain.

‘I wasn’t taught how to deal with fame and I was swept along with it,’ she says. ‘I remember one photographer getting me to wear a basque with suspenders and stockings. They were trying to promote the programme as sexy and wanted me to act in that way.

‘I made wrong choices. I was torn between my idea of what a “proper” actress was, and the sexy image the media wanted me to portray. I was insecure and naive. Besides, a part of me thought the publicity was good for my career, if not good for me as a person.’

‘People started looking at me on the street and in shops. The first time it happened, I was in the linen department in Harrods. I thought I must have my skirt tucked into my pants. Then I heard someone whisper, “It’s Prue.” I felt so self-conscious,’ she says.

‘I was driven by insecurity and the fear of not being good enough. I always thought there were other people more beautiful and famous than me and that I wasn’t doing as well as they were.’

It is a feeling Susan, who is now 60, has struggled with until recently, and it is one that stems from her unconventional and deeply troubled childhood.

Like Prue, she suffered from a dysfunctional relationship with her father – although in Susan’s case the problem was his continued absence.

Bill Penhaligon had been an engineer for Shell and both Susan and her younger brother Michael were born when he was working in the Philippines.

She still has fond memories of that time. ‘I adored my father and am told I was a daddy’s girl,’ she says. ‘He was affectionate and encouraging when I started reading Dickens at six.’

But Bill and her mother Jean began to grow apart. When Susan was seven she was sent to stay with her grandmother in Cornwall until her parents divorced and Jean came back to bring up her family alone in St Ives.

For a couple of years, they enjoyed an idyllic existence, growing up amid a ‘left-bank’ community of up-and-coming abstract artists. But by the time Susan was ten, her mother, who ran a bed and breakfast, sent her away to boarding school.

Her bohemian upbringing was interrupted and she had little contact with her father.

When Susan reached the age of 14, he vanished altogether. ‘He didn’t write or send cards,’ she says. ‘It hurt tremendously.’

She was 20 and had just graduated from drama school by the time she plucked up the courage to make contact with him.

Bill had moved to San Francisco, on the advice of his doctor, who said a milder climate would help his increasingly weak heart. He was working as an investigator for the Marines and had remarried.

‘He bought me a present of a suede coat with a fur collar,’ she says. ‘I’ve never met such a guilty man. In those days, men didn’t express their emotions. This was his way of saying sorry.’

She saw him once more. ‘He looked so sick that I cried and cried afterwards,’ she says.

‘I knew he wouldn’t be around for long and I wished I’d had more time to spend with him.’

His death, two years after their reunion, shaped her attitude towards men. ‘Having not had the constant love and presence of my father, I thought nobody could truly love me for what I was,’ she says.

She married her first husband, actor Nicholas Loukes, when she was 21. They had met on the set of an adaptation of Romeo And Juliet, in which both she and Nicholas performed naked. Inevitably, it caused a storm of controversy – one that, in all probability, gave Susan a platform on which to build her career.

‘I was sent hate mail, calling me a slapper,’ she says. Within months, she and Nicholas divorced.

‘I was too young and confused,’ she says. ‘My mother – who had given up her own acting career, entertaining the troops, when she met my father – had been telling me to settle down and give up acting. She said it would never make me happy, which isn’t a great message to give an ambitious young girl.’

Nicholas died suddenly just a week later from a mystery virus, a loss she finds as traumatic as the divorce itself.

‘I felt guilty because he died and because I hurt him,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t invited to the funeral but I wrote him a poem which I put in a bottle and placed on his grave.’

In 1974, she married her second husband, David Munro, a documentary-maker whom she had met on a blind date.

Their son, Truan – who is now 30 and lives with Susan – was born five years later, but the marriage failed when he was just a year old.

‘We were unprepared for the demands of parenthood and our careers got in the way,’ she says.

It sounds like an excuse – Susan’s way of pre-empting failure and the potential to get hurt – not least because before she divorced she’d had an affair with actor Doug Fisher, an affair that effectively ended the marriage and was to last another six years.

Meanwhile, she was forced to juggle single motherhood (something of a taboo in itself in those days) with work.

There was, of course, a sequel to Bouquet Of Barbed Wire, in 1977, called Another Bouquet. The original cast members were in it but Prue had already been killed off.

The glittering showbusiness career that beckoned never materialised, although Susan is reluctant to admit it.

She did work consistently, however, and appeared alongside Judi Dench and Michael Williams in the sitcom A Fine Romance, and later in the film A Kind Of Loving, based on the novel by Stan Barstow.

‘A lot of my work was just as successful as Bouquet Of Barbed Wire,’ she insists, somewhat unconvincingly. ‘And working in the West End meant I could see Truan in the evenings.’

A fall-off in offers of work coincided with her desire to have a second child. She had married her third husband, Yorkshire-born actor Duncan Preston, in 1986.

Three years later, she had an ectopic pregnancy and miscarried. It is still something she struggles to talk about. ‘It was a very dark period,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t very well afterwards and, of course, it affected my relationship with Duncan.’

They divorced in 1992, and Susan entered what she wryly describes as her ‘midlife crisis’.

‘I felt deeply ashamed because I had been divorced three times,’ she says. ‘I’d reached 40 and thought, “I have to take responsibility for my own life.” I do think some people take much longer growing up than others. I certainly did.’

She left their house in Chiswick, West London, and moved into her current residence, a two-bedroom houseboat on the Thames, also in West London.

In 1997, she and Preston – now 63 and most popular for playing Stan in Victoria Wood’s sitcom Dinner Ladies – reunited.

‘Several friends, including my ex-husband David, had died or were ill. I realised how short life was and that I’d had a man I loved very much and wanted to be with,’ she says.

It was, perhaps, a sign that she had finally come to terms with her turbulent relationship with men. That said, they are still not actually living together and have no plans to remarry.

Preston plays Douglas Potts in the ITV soap Emmerdale – a show Susan has also appeared in – and commutes between Leeds and his home in North London.

‘We’re like chalk and cheese,’ she says. ‘Duncan is about as conventional as you get. He wouldn’t live in a boat, put it that way.’

Susan, meanwhile, is philosophical about her own career, which, has, most recently, involved touring with the Agatha Christie Theatre Company, performing a selection of the author’s plays.

She doesn’t exactly boast a dazzling CV, but she doesn’t see herself as a failure, either.

‘I have kept working for 40 years and in this industry I count simply being in it a success,’ she says. Susan says ageing makes acting even more of a ‘struggle’ and, understandably, is critical of her industry’s attitude towards women of her generation.

‘Getting older doesn’t mean you’re not sexual any more,’ she says. ‘I don’t see why we should go off the radar. At first, when I turned 60 I took it personally. I wondered how it had happened to me. Then I pulled myself together.’

What does bother her, however, is the constant comparisons to Prue. ‘I hope they give the role of Prue to an unknown actress, to give them a chance like I had. It was a wonderful part and I’m grateful for it,’ she says.

‘With age comes acceptance. I am a complete believer that what happens to you in childhood affects your adult life. But I also think you can sort it out and become your own person.

‘The most wonderful thing about reaching the age I am now is that I am completely me. I am the happiest I have ever been in my life.’

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'I thought it would last forever... but I went into a dark period': Bouquet Of Barbed Wire star Susan Penhaligon reveals her controversial route to fame